Yishai moves to legalize Jewish ownership of East Jerusalem building

Date Published: February 8,2010

Source: Harretz

Interior Minister Eli Yishai on Monday moved toward legalizing Jewish ownership of an East Jerusalem building, authorizing the district planning commission to take on the matter without first notifying Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. 

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said he was not involved in the matter. 

Yishai’s move was exposed by Israel’s Channel 1 hours after the Jerusalem Municipality canceled the distribution of evacuation orders for Beit Yonatan, a residential building erected by nationalist Jews in the heart of an Arab neighborhood in East Jerusalem. 

Yishai confirmed the that he had ordered the move and had received assurance that a majority of the council would vote in favor of the move. 

The interior minister also said that the residents of Beit Yonatan agreed to move their occupancy two floors down, making it legal. Yishai added that the council was expected to approve a similar move on other contentious buildings in the area. 

Less than a week ago, Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat bowed to pressure from legal officials and said he would uphold the court order to evacuate and seal Beit Yonatan. 

In a letter to State Prosecutor Moshe Lador, Barkat pledged to enforce the court order to evacuate the structure, though he added that he was doing so under protest. Barkat also wrote that the municipality would tear down some 200 Palestinian homes slated for demolition in East Jerusalem. He warned, however, that enforcing the court order fully is liable to trigger a violent response from the Palestinian community. 

The Jewish-owned building, named for convicted spy Jonathan Pollard, lies in Silwan, an Arab part of East Jerusalem. A court ruling declared the home was built without the proper permits. 

In his letter to Lador, Barkat said the court orders sabotaged a municipal plan to resolve the matter of illegal construction in East Jerusalem. The plan would have allowed the buildings and their residents to remain in place, he said. 

Barkat also criticized the Jerusalem municipality’s legal consultant, Yossi Havilio, who was the most vocal official in favor of enforcing the court orders. 

Last week, Lador sent a letter to Barkat reprimanding him for his refusal to shutter Beit Yonatan. 

“Acceptance of the situation in which court orders are not carried out expresses a biting failure,” Lador said, adding that “Israel is a law abiding country, and in lawful countries court orders must be carried out.

Gaza’s state of health … not so good

Gallo/Getty

Date Published:February 8th, 2010

Source: Middle East Blog, by Ayman Mohyeldin

We all know what its like when we go to the doctor’s office for that routine check up once a year … and undoubtedly there is that moment of anxiousness when the doctor looks you in the face to level his criticism on what you can do better next year. 

So you leave the office, go to the nearest gym, sign up for that cardio class and then off to the supermarket to get that new low fat salad dressing. It’s a new year and you are gonna take your health seriously!

A universal human right for all…

That’s the way it should be … for you and for the people of Gaza. But Gaza’s health report card just came back … and it ain’t looking good for the 1.7 million people living under a stifling siege.

Even worse, there is little the people here can do about it.

According to the United Nations, which examined the state of health one year on from Israel’s brutal war on Gaza, a collapsed economy and staggering unemployment will undoubtedly have a negative impact on the physical and mental health of the people here. 

Here are some of the highlights, or should I say the sad points, of Gaza’s Health:

● Infant mortality rates, which were steadily declining in recent years have stalled.

● 15 of Gaza’s 27 hospitals were damaged or destroyed in Israel’s war and have yet to be rebuilt or repaired. 

● Since 2000, very few medical professionals have been able to leave for training to update their clinical skills or learn about new medical technologies – which in return limits their ability to provide adequate health care. 

● Many patients are in need of specialised treatments not available in Gaza and referred abroad for care. Sadly, their applications to travel for care get delayed or denied by the Israeli authorities and some have died while waiting for referrals.

But some times its not the press releases or the statements that sum up the difficult situation in Gaza, or even the peoples own stories. Here is a animated clip from the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem that captures what is so wrong with the Israeli siege on Gaza. 

‘A prescription for civil war’

Allegations of misconduct have been made against Palestinian security services [GALLO/GETTY

Date Published:February 08, 2010

Source: Aljazeera English 

By:By Jon Elmer in Bethlehem in West Bank, palestine.

Abu Abdullah has never been charged with a crime, but he has been arrested by Palestinian security forces so many times in the past two years that he has lost count.

He has been arrested at work, in the market, on the street, and, more than once, during violent raids by masked men who burst into his home and seized him in front of his family.

Deep in the heart of the Deheishe refugee camp on the outskirts of Bethlehem, Abu Abdullah describes in detail the beatings he has endured in custody, the numerous cold, sleepless nights in cramped and filthy cells, the prolonged periods bound in painful stress positions, and the long hours of aggressive questioning.

“The interrogations always begin the same way,” Abu Abdullah explains. “They demand to know who I voted for in the last election.”

Abu Abdullah is not alone. Since Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s caretaker government took power in Ramallah in June 2007, stories like Abu Abdullah’s have become commonplace in the West Bank.

The arrests are part of a wider plan being executed by Palestinian security forces – trained and funded by American and European backers – to crush opposition and consolidate the Fatah-led government’s grip on power in the West Bank.

An international effort

The government of Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, is bolstered by thousands of newly trained police and security forces whose stated aim is to eliminate Islamist groups that may pose a threat to its power – namely Hamas and their supporters.

Under the auspices of Lieutenant-General Keith Dayton, the US security coordinator, these security forces receive hands-on training from Canadian, British and Turkish military personnel at a desert training centre in Jordan.

The programme has been carefully coordinated with Israeli security officials.

Since 2007 the Jordan International Police Training Center has trained and deployed five Palestinian National Security Force battalions in the West Bank.

By the end of Dayton’s appointment in 2011, the $261mn project will see 10 new security battalions, one for each of the nine West Bank governorates and one unit in reserve.

Their aim is clear. Speaking before a House of Representatives subcommittee in 2007, Dayton described the project as “truly important to advance our national interests, deliver security to Palestinians, and preserve and protect the interests of the state of Israel”.

Others are even more explicit about what the force is for. When Nahum Barnea, a senior Israeli defence correspondent, sat in on a top-level coordinating meeting between Palestinian and Israeli commanders in 2008, he says he was stunned by what he heard.

“Hamas is the enemy, and we have decided to wage an all-out war,” Barnea quoted Majid Faraj, then the head of Palestinian military intelligence, as telling the Israeli commanders. “We are taking care of every Hamas institution in accordance with your instructions.”

After the takeover

 

Ten new security battalions will be created under the Dayton project [GALLO/GETTY]

When he arrived in the last days of 2005, Dayton’s assignment was to create a Palestinian security force ostensibly tasked with confronting the Palestinian resistance. The project began in Gaza.

 

Sean McCormack, a state department spokesman at the time, explained Dayton’s role as “the real down in the weeds, blocking and tackling work of helping to build up the security forces”.

But within weeks of his arrival, things began to fall apart. Hamas’ decisive January 2006 election victory ushered in a crippling international blockade on the Palestinians in Gaza. Soon after, the security forces of Hamas and Fatah began fighting in the streets, culminating in Hamas’ June 2007 takeover of the enclave.

Dayton’s initial aims lay in tatters, and while Fayyad became prime minister in a ‘caretaker’ government in Ramallah, a new security strategy was formulated.

As a grim status-quo established itself in Gaza, Dayton’s new mission became clear. The job of the security coordinator was now “to prevent a Hamas takeover in the West Bank,” according to Michael Eisenstadt, Dayton’s former plans officer.

A coordinated attack on Hamas’ civilian apparatus was launched immediately after the takeover in Gaza in June 2007. Major-General Gadi Shamni, the head of the Israeli army’s central command, led an initiative to target the base of Hamas’ support in the West Bank. The plan, dubbed the Dawa Strategy, involved pin-pointing Hamas’ extensive social welfare apparatus, the lynchpin of their popularity amongst many Palestinians.

Dr Omar Abdel Razeq, a former finance minister in the short-lived Hamas government, explains the effect this had. “When we talk about the infrastructure we are talking about the societies and the cooperatives and the institutions that were to help the poor,” he says. “They finished [off] the infrastructure of Hamas.”

Israeli Brigadier-General Michael Herzog, the chief of staff to Ehud Barak, Israel’s defence minister, summed up the Israeli view of the project. “[Dayton's] doing a great job,” he said. “We’re very happy with what he’s doing.”

Torture allegations

The Dawa Strategy has seen more than 1,000 Palestinians jailed by Palestinian Authority (PA) forces. The arrests – though concentrated on Hamas and its suspected allies – have touched a broad swathe of Palestinian society, and all political factions.

They have targeted social workers, students, teachers, journalists. There have been regular raids on mosques, university campus’ and charities, and repeated allegations of torture carried out by US and European-funded security officers, including several deaths in custody.

In October, Abbas issued a decree against the most violent forms of torture used by his forces and replaced the interior minister, General Abdel Razak al-Yahya, a long-time US and Israeli partner, with Said Abu Ali.

While noting an improvement since the decree, human rights workers say the changes are not enough. “There is still no due process, still no legal justifications for many of the arrests and civilians are still being brought before military courts,” says Salah Moussa, an Independent Commission for Human Rights attorney.

Major-General Adnan Damiri, a spokesperson for the Palestinian security forces, acknowledged wrongdoing but attributed the acts to individuals and not to a policy.

“Sometimes there are officers or soldiers who have made mistakes in this way, with torture,” Damiri said. “But now we are punishing them.”

Damiri cited 42 cases of torture in the past three months that resulted in various forms of reprimand, including loss of rank. Six soldiers were dismissed for their acts.

But on the streets, the mood is darkening as the foreign-backed security services tighten their grip on the West Bank.

Naje Odeh, a leftist community leader in Deheishe who operates a thriving youth centre in the camp, characterised the security apparatus as akin to the US-allied regimes in Jordan and Egypt. “If you speak out, you are arrested,” he explains. “This behaviour will destroy our society.”

Odeh says the security forces carrying out the raids know that what they are doing is wrong. “Why are they masked?” he asks rhetorically. “Because we know these people. We know their families. They are ashamed of what they are doing.”

Some fear that the behaviour of the US and EU-trained security forces will spark potentially deadly confrontation.

“If they attack your mosques, your classrooms, your societies, you can be patient, but for how long?” a senior Islamist leader in the West Bank asks.

Abdel Razeq, the former Hamas finance minister, is more explicit in his predictions.

He says: “If the security forces insist on defending the Israelis, this is a prescription for civil war.”

Israeli forces raid West Bank camp

Israeli forces said the raid was aimed at 'putting order' in the area [AFP

Date Published: Febraury 07, 2010

Source: Aljazeera English

Israeli forces have raided a Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank, arresting at least 40 people.

The arrests on Monday at the Shuafat camp in annexed east Jerusalem were part of an operation that Israeli police said was aimed at “putting order” in the area.

Al Jazeera’s Elias Karram, reporting from the camp, said: “The raid was divided into two parts: the first of which ended on Monday when Israeli army and intelligence forces invaded the came and detained around 40 poeple based on their political affliation – either to Hamas or Fatah.

“The second part is still under way and it targets Palestinian workers who have come from various parts of the West Bank to work in the camps without necessary working permits.”

Israeli troops also stormed shops and hospitals in the camp, Karram said.

Rights group targeted

In a separate incident, Israeli military officials raided offices of Stop the Wall, a human-rights group that campaigns against the construction of the West Bank separation barrier.

Stop the Wall released a statement on Monday saying that at least 10 military vehicles invaded the city of Ramallah before officials searched through the offices, “confiscating computer hard disks, laptops, and video cameras along with paper documents, CDs, and video cassettes”.

Jamal Jumaa, the co-ordinator of Stop the Wall, said in the statement: “This is part of the continuous targeting of the popular grassroots movement and the struggle of the Palestinian human rights defenders for Israeli accountability.

“Palestinians will not be intimidated by this. The struggle against the Wall will only stop once the decision of the International Court of Justice, which calls for the Wall to be torn down, is implemented.”

Jumaa said: “We call on the international community and in particular the European Union to step up pressure on Israel to ensure it respects international law and human rights and ends its repression of Palestinian and international human rights defenders working on the ground.”

The raid came after Jumaa was arrested along with Mohammad Othman, a youth co-ordinator from Stop the Wall. Both activists were released on Monday.

Arrest campaign

In recent months, Israel has intensified its arrest campaign against those involved in the anti-barrier protests. Two pro-Palestinian foreigners were arrested on Sunday.

The activists were employed with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), one from Spain and the other from Australia.

Israeli forces routinely enter the territory to arrest Palestinians accused of “militant activity”.

However, Sunday’s raid marks only the second time troops have seized foreigners there on suspicion their visas had expired.

The ISM is involved in protests against the separation barrier.

Omer Shatz, the activists’ lawyer, says he believes his clients were targeted because of their political activity.

Robert Fisk: Why does the US turn a blind eye to Israeli bulldozers?

Date Pubished: February 08, 2010

Source: The Palestine Telegraph

 Palestine” is no more. Call it a “peace process” or a “road map”; blame it on Barack Obama’s weakness, his pathetic, childish admission – like an optimistic doctor returning a sick child to its parents without hope of recovery – that a Middle East peace was “more difficult” to reach than he imagined.

But the dream of a “two-state” Israeli-Palestinian solution, a security-drenched but noble settlement to decades of warfare between Israelis and Palestinians is as good as dead.

 Both the United States and Europe now stand idly by while the Israeli government effectively destroys any hope of a Palestinian state; even as you read these words, Israel’s bulldozers and demolition orders are destroying the last chance of peace; not only in the symbolic centre of Jerusalem itself but – strategically, far more important – in 60 per cent of the vast, biblical lands of the occupied West Bank, in that largest sector in which Jews now outnumber Muslims two to one.

 

This majority of the West Bank – known under the defunct Oslo Agreement’s sinister sobriquet as “Area C” – has already fallen under an Israeli rule which amounts to apartheid by paper: a set of Israeli laws which prohibit almost all Palestinian building or village improvements, which shamelessly smash down Palestinian homes for which permits are impossible to obtain, ordering the destruction of even restored Palestinian sewage systems. Israeli colonists have no such problems; which is why 300,000 Israelis now live – in 220 settlements which are all internationally illegal – in the richest and most fertile of the Palestinian occupied lands.

When Obama’s elderly envoy George Mitchell headed home in humiliation this week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu celebrated his departure by planting trees in two of the three largest Israeli colonies around Jerusalem. With these trees at Gush Etzion and Ma’aleh Adumim, he said, he was sending “a clear message that we are here. We will stay here. We are planning and we are building.” These two huge settlements, along with that of Ariel to the north of Jerusalem, were an “indisputable part of Israel forever.”

 

It was Netanyahu’s victory celebration over the upstart American President who had dared to challenge Israel’s power not only in the Middle East but in America itself. And while the world this week listened to Netanyahu in the Holocaust memorial commemoration for the genocide of six million Jews, abusing Iran as the new Nazi Germany – Iran’s loony president supposedly as evil as Hitler – the hopes of a future “Palestine” continued to dribble away. President Ahmadinejad of Iran is no more Adolf Hitler than the Israelis are Nazis. But the “threat” of Iran is distracting the world. So is Tony Blair yesterday, trying to wriggle out of his bloody responsibility for the Iraq disaster. The real catastrophe, however, continues just outside Jerusalem, amid the fields, stony hills and ancient caves of most of the West Bank

Friends of Humanity: 2009 is the worst year in the history of Palestinian detainees

Date Published: February 8, 2010

Source: The Palestine Telegraph

Friends of Humanity International organization, based in Vienna, issued on Saturday a detailed report entitled “Beyond the Sun” on the reality of Palestinian detainees in Israeli jails; the organization reported that 2009 was the worst year in history of Palestinian detainees utterly. 
“In 2009, The Israeli Prison service practiced new methods of torture against Palestinian detainees in order to increase physical and psychological pressure on them so that they could not live normal life if they were released one day. In addition, it intended to destroy the physiological state of detainees and their families by the ban of visitation right for along period.” report mentioned 
The report added. “The detainee’s ability to endure the difficult circumstances of the imprisonment in Israeli Jails for being survival means great thing in the process of defending their rights to life” 
It pointed out that the number of detainees in Israeli prisons amounted to 7286 at the end of 2009, including 36 female detainees, 20 member of Parliaments and Ministers and 250 children under 18 years. 
The report indicated that there were 319 detainees imprisoned before signing Oslo accord between the government of Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1993; those detainees are known as longest serving detainees in Israeli prisons, including 115 detainees served more than 20 years in Israeli prisons.

Marginal detainees 
The reports focused on the detainees of Jerusalem city and Palestinian territories occupied in 1948 because the Israeli authorities intended to marginalize their issue and still refuse to free any one of them as a part of prisoners swap with the Palestinians. The number of detainees of Jerusalem amounted to 237, including 4 female detainees. It mentioned also that 14 detainees of Jerusalem passed away inside Israeli prisons.

Violations
The report showed that the formation of a special Ministerial Committee by the Israeli government is the most dangerous event occurred in 2009. This committee aims at studying and evaluating the conditions of Palestinian detainees in order to tighten the screw on them.
It explained that more than 1,000 prisoners suffering from chronic diseases are medically neglected and more than 1,500 others, 775 of them from Gaza, are deprived of seeing their loved ones for long periods of time. 
Israeli forces used detainees as human shields during the last war on Gaza Strip and those detainees were caught in the cross fire. 
15 Palestinian detained in 2009; most of them were Gazans. They were arrested under what so called “unlawful combatant”. The organizations said that the above mentioned arrest violates the standards of fair trial and the principles of human rights

 

Photo by Eman Jomaa

 

Complete power outage imminent in Gaza

Date Published: February 6, 2010

Source: The Palestine Telegraph

 The Energy and Natural Resources Authority in Gaza warned that a severe shortage of fuel will force it to shut down electricity by Sunday.

Kanan Abaid, head of the authority, said on Saturday that only enough fuel is available for one more day, warning of a crisis if the station stopped working.

He pointed out that the decline in station production is a result of Israeli restrictions on fuel import, constituting a collective punishment of all Gaza Strip residents.

If Israel does not resume supplying the besieged Gaza Strip with fuel, the company will not be able to provide electricity on Sunday morning, which means that Gaza will descend into darkness.

The company has already been forced to cut off electricity for eight hours per day in different areas of the Gaza Strip.

Photo: Eman Jomaa

Is it just the calm before the storm in Israel?

 

Date Published: February 6, 201

Source: The Palestine Telegraph

 It’s been a year since the election that brought Benjamin Netanyahu to power in Israel and, for most Israelis, it’s been the best year in recent memory. There has been almost no violence or breaches of security, and the country’s economy weathered the world recession remarkably well.

Israelis, for the most part, feel safe and secure, and the Prime Minister’s rating in public opinion surveys reflects that satisfaction: Netanyahu is retaining his hold on his centre-right supporters and is gaining support among voters in the centre and on the left. The only drop he has suffered is among voters of the far right who reject his temporary freeze on construction in some Israeli settlements on the West Bank.

Now, it seems, 2010 is supposed to be even calmer. The country’s annual intelligence assessment released this week spoke of “low probability of war” and little likelihood of serious clashes.

But as veteran Israeli observers will tell you, when you hear such rosy forecasts, it’s time to head for the shelters.

“Experience in the Middle East shows that calm can turn into tension, and tension can turn into war, in an instant,” wrote Aluf Benn in yesterday’s Haaretz newspaper.

A flare-up in sabre-rattling with Syria is the exception that proved the rule. Syrian officials warned that, if there were a war, Israeli cities would become targets, and that drew a bellicose response from Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who said that, in that event, the Assad regime would be toppled.

Netanyahu moved swiftly to calm the waters and return matters to their previous quiet. Israelis were left scratching their heads about where all the rhetoric had come from.

It came, in fact, from an apparent misinterpretation by Damascus of remarks made earlier this week by Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister and the current Defence Minister. Mr. Barak had told an audience that, if peace with Syria is not achieved, Israel could face an unnecessary war that would leave issues between the countries exactly where they are now.

It was intended as a cautionary note to Israelis not to be complacent, but it so surprised the regime of Bashar al-Assad that they took it for a threat. Perhaps it’s one of the consequences of not having a channel of communications between the two countries’ leaders.

Barak’s warning has fallen on deaf ears in Israel, where most people can’t imagine a peace that would entail giving back to Syria the Golan Heights, which Israel captured in the 1967 Six-Day War.

“Why would we want do that?” people ask. “There’s no chance of war with Syria, and the Golan has become part of Israel. It’s a great place to visit during Passover.”

Barak is not alone in warning of the danger of complacency.

Jordan’s King Abdullah and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan also have cautioned Israel about being too smug.

“Israel should give some thought to what it would be like to lose a friend like Turkey in the future,” Erdogan said this week.

It was Ankara that provided the good offices through which Israeli and Syrian officials conducted negotiations aimed at a peace agreement more than a year ago.

But the once-valued ally – Turkey and Israel even carried out joint military exercises – has been snubbed by the Netanyahu administration for having criticized Israel’s assault on Gaza early last year.

As for the Palestinians, with whom Netanyahu has yet to enter into peace talks, Barak also warned: “A deadlock will lead to another round of violence that will serve Hamas.”

Up to now, there has been little public pressure on Mr. Netanyahu to change things.

Most Israelis never encounter Palestinians, though most Israelis live within a few kilometres of them. Few Palestinians can enter Israel, including east Jerusalem, and almost no prudent Israelis ever journey into the Palestinian territories. Israelis are more likely to visit Rangoon than Ramallah.

Most of the Israelis who do come into contact with Palestinians are settlers, and that contact usually is through their car windows, as they whisk past Palestinians on the sides of the roads that carry Israelis to their settlements in the West Bank.

It is true that life is better these days for many Palestinians, as the Netanyahu government has removed many internal checkpoints and the Palestinian economy has blossomed.

But the comforts that have arrived in the West Bank’s major cities have yet to trickle down to the hundreds of Palestinian villages and smaller towns.

As well, the dream of statehood remains elusive, and the Palestinian Authority has a president whose term expired more than a year ago. The elected Palestinian Legislative Council has been suspended for almost three years.

President Mahmoud Abbas stands firm in his refusal to negotiate with Israelis until they cease construction in all settlements, including those in east Jerusalem. This position wins him a measure of respect, but the settlements continue to expand, and the rival Hamas organization grows stronger.

Rather than trying to find a solution in peace talks, the Palestinian Authority harasses Hamas officials and keeps some 600 Hamas members in jail. The result of such heavy-handedness is to distance many of the people from their rulers and to generate more support for Hamas.

Few Israelis, however, feel the need to press Mr. Netanyahu into ending this situation by agreeing to Abbas’s demand for a real halt to settlement construction.

To most Israelis, security is measured in whether they feel safe taking the bus or sitting in a popular café, both of which had been targets of suicide bombers in the past. By such measures, Israelis feel very safe. The last suicide bombing was five years ago and, for every warning from a King Abdullah or a Recep Tayyip Erdogan, there’s a Silvio Berlusconi or a Mike Huckabee to reassure Israelis they’re doing everything right.

Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad has taken his case to the enemy’s camp, speaking this week at the annual Herzliya Conference, at which Israeli leaders regularly attend. He told his audience that, if Palestinians didn’t achieve statehood through negotiations, they would opt for a unilateral declaration of independence. His biggest task, he said, is constructing the infrastructure for such a day.

Fayyad is dead serious, and the prospect of a unilateral declaration and a campaign to win world support for the Palestinian state should jar Israelis out of their complacence. But the fact that he spoke in such a gathering of elite Israelis suggests he is more friend than enemy, so why worry?

President Barack Obama’s recent admission of failure to get Israeli-Palestinian peace talks started, meanwhile, has left the Netanyahu government gloating and the Israeli peace camp marginalized.

History, however, suggests this smugness could be the calm before the storm. In 1973, recalls Gideon Rafael, a former director general of foreign affairs, Israelis were brimming with confidence from their victory in the 1967 war and didn’t see the coming of the Yom Kippur War that would almost defeat them.

Similarly, in the wake of the 1979 Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty and the successful routing of the Palestine Liberation Organization in Lebanon in 1982, Israel was blind to the advent of the Palestinian intifada in 1987 and the potency that campaign would have.

And in the late 1990s, Israel was basking in the glow of the Oslo peace process and was blind to the second, more violent intifada on the horizon.

Israelis aren’t likely to heed Ehud Barak’s warnings right now; they have been conditioned to reject criticism. And who can blame them? For 62 years, their little country has been mostly isolated and often at war. They don’t want to hear bad news just when things seem quiet.

But it’s got so that even great supporters of Israel can’t criticize it with impunity.

This week, a right-wing movement, Im Tirtzu, has launched a campaign against the New Israel Fund, a 30-year-old organization that supports various human-rights groups in Israel. It blasts the NIF for assisting Richard Goldstone, the South African judge whose report on the Gaza campaign raised questions about possible war crimes and crimes against humanity, and for supporting the idea of an independent inquiry into the Gaza assault.

On Thursday, NIF president Naomi Chazan was told by The Jerusalem Post that it was dropping her weekly column.

One more critical voice is quieted, and the rest of the country goes back to planning its Passover vacation.

This commentary originally appeared in Toronto’s Globe and Mail.

To shoot an elephant

Source : To Shoot An Elephant

To download click here.

_____

Sinopsis

 

“…afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting of the elephant. The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do nothing. Besides, legally I had done the right thing, for a mad elephant has to be killed, like a mad dog, if it’s owner fails to control it”.

George Orwell defined a way of witnessing Asia that still remains valid. “To shoot an elephant” is an eye witness account from The Gaza Strip. December 27th, 2008, Operation Cast Lead. 21 days shooting elephants. Urgent, insomniac, dirty, shuddering images from the only foreigners who decided and managed to stay embedded inside Gaza strip ambulances, with Palestinian civilians.

George Orwell: “Shooting an elephant” was originally published in New Writing in 1948.

Context

 

Gaza Strip has been under siege since June 2007, when Israel declared it an “enemy entity”. A group of international activists organized a siege-breaking movement, the Free Gaza movement. Thanks to their efforts, and despite the Israeli ban on foreign correspondents and humanitarian aid workers to cover and witness operation “Cast Lead” on the ground, a group of international volunteers: self organised members of the International Solidarity Movement were present in Gaza when the bombing started on December, 27th 2009. Together with two international correspondents from Al Jazeera International (Ayman Mohyeldin and Sherine Tadros), they were the only foreigners who managed to write, film and report for several radio stations what was happening inside the besieged Palestinian strip.

Were they journalists? Were they activists? Who cares!. They became witnesses. Being a journalist or being whatsoever depends on how you feel. It is an ethical responsibility that you manage to share with a wider audience what you and those who are around you are going through. It will be the result of your work that will lead you to a professional career as a journalist or not, rather than pre-assumptions and labels. Make them know. Make those who you want to: listen and be aware of what you are aware of. That is a journalist. Having a card, with “press” written on it, or getting a regular salary is not necessary to be a witness with a camera or a pen. Forget about neutrality. Forget about objectivity. We are not Palestinians. We are not Israelis. We are not impartial. We only try to be honest and report what we see and what we know. I am a journalist. If somebody listens, I am a journalist. In Gaza´s case, no “official journalists” were authorized to enter Gaza (apart from those who were already inside) so we became witnesses. With a whole set of responsibilities as regarding to it.

I have always understood journalism as “a hand turning the lights on inside the dark room”. A journalist is a curious person, an unpleasant interrogator, a rebel camera and a pen making those in power feel uncomfortable. And that is the concept of my work in Gaza: To fulfil a duty in the most narrated conflict on earth, where the story of the siege and the collective punishment that is being imposed by Israel on the whole population of the territory in retaliation for rockets sent by Hamas will never be told with enough accuracy. For this it has to be lived. I sneaked inside Gaza despite Israeli attempts not to allow us to enter and I was “politely” asked to leave by those in power in Gaza. That is my idea of journalism. Every government on earth should feel nervous about somebody going around with a camera or a pen ready to publish what he or she manages to understand. For the sake of information, one of the biggest pillars of democracy.

This is an embedded film. We decided to be “embedded within the ambulances” opening an imaginary dialogue with those journalists who embed themselves within armies. Everyone is free to choose the side where they want to report from. But decisions are often not unbiased. We decided that civilians working for the rescue of the injured would give us a far more honest perspective of the situation than those whose job is to shoot, to injure and to kill. We prefer medics rather than soldiers. We prefer the bravery of those unarmed rescuers than those with -also interesting, but morally rejectable experiences who enlist to kill. It is a matter of focus. I am not interested in the fears, traumas and contradictions of those who have a choice: the choice of staying home and saying no to war.

Crew

 

Directors: Alberto Arce/ Mohammad Rujailah

Script: Alberto Arce/ Miquel Marti Freixas

Editing: Alberto Arce/ Miquel marti Freixas

Sound: Francesc Gosalves

Posproduction: Jorge Fernández Mayoral

Co-production/distribution: Eguzki Bideoak.

Translation: Mohammad Rujailah/ Alberto Arce

Design Team: Mr. Brown and Mabrilan

Duration:112´

Blair: Gaza’s great betrayer

Tony Blair in June 2009 speaking at a press conference in Gaza calling for a quick reconstruction. Photograph: Hatem Moussa/AP

Date Published:  3 February 2010

Source: The Guardian

It’s more than a year since Israel launched its immoral attack on Gaza and Palestinians are still living on the verge of a humanitarian disaster. So what has Tony Blair done to further peace in the region? Virtually nothing, argues the historian Avi Shlaim

The savage attack Israel ­unleashed against Gaza on 27 December 2008 was both immoral and unjustified. Immoral in the use of force against civilians for political purposes. Unjustified because Israel had a political alternative to the use of force. The home-made Qassam rockets fired by Hamas militants from Gaza on Israeli towns were only the ­excuse, not the reason for Operation Cast Lead. In June 2008, Egypt had ­brokered a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement. ­Contrary to Israeli propaganda, this was a success: the average number of rockets fired monthly from Gaza dropped from 179 to three. Yet on 4 November Israel violated the ceasefire by launching a raid into Gaza, killing six Hamas fighters. When Hamas ­retaliated, Israel seized the renewed rocket attacks as the ­excuse for launching its insane offensive. If all Israel wanted was to protect its citizens from Qassam rockets, it only needed to ­observe the ceasefire.

While the war failed in its primary aim of regime change in Gaza, it left ­behind a trail of death, devastation, ­destruction and indescribable human suffering. Israel lost 13 people, three in so-called friendly fire. The Palestinian death toll was 1,387, including 773 civilians (115 women and 300 children), and more than 5,300 people were injured. The ­entire population of 1.5 million was left traumatised. Across the Gaza Strip, 3,530 homes were completely ­destroyed, 2,850 severely damaged and 11,000 suffered structural damage.

The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, tending to the needs of four million Palestinian ­refugees, stated that Gaza had been “bombed back, not to the Stone Age, but to the mud age”; its inhabitants ­reduced to building homes from mud after the fierce 22-day offensive.

War crimes were committed and possibly even crimes against humanity, documented in horrific detail in Judge Richard Goldstone’s report for the UN human rights council. The report ­condemned both Israel and Hamas, but reserved its strongest criticism for Israel, accusing it of deliberately targeting and terrorising civilians in Gaza. The British government did not take part in the vote on the report, sending a signal to the hawks in Israel that they can continue to disregard the laws of war. Gordon Brown’s 2007 appointment as a patron of the Jewish National Fund UK presumably played a part in the adoption of this ­pusillanimous position.

One year on, the Gaza Strip, one of the most densely populated areas on earth, continues to teeter on the verge of a humanitarian disaster. Israel’s ­illegal blockade of Gaza, in force since June 2007, restricts the flow not only of arms but also food, fuel and medical supplies to well below the minimum necessary for normal, everyday life. Reconstruction work has hardly begun because of the Israeli ban on bringing in cement and other building materials to Gaza. Thousands of families still live in the ruins of their former homes. Hospitals, health facilities, schools, government buildings and mosques cannot be rebuilt. Nor can the basic ­infrastructure of the Gaza Strip, including Gaza City’s sewage disposal plant. Today, 80% of Gaza’s population ­remain dependent on food aid, 43% are unemployed, and 70% live on less than $1 a day.

Meanwhile, the so-called peace process cannot be revived because ­Israel refuses to freeze settlement ­expansion on the West Bank. Prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu recently agreed to a temporary freeze of 10 months, but this does not apply to the 3,000 pre-approved housing units to be built on the West Bank or to any part of Greater Jerusalem. It’s like two men negotiating the division of a pizza while one continues to gobble it up.

Politically, the disjunction between words and deeds persists. Appeals to the Israeli government to lift or relax the blockade of Gaza were not backed up by effective pressure or the threat of sanctions. In fact, the only effective pressure was applied by the US on the Egyptian government – to seal its border with Gaza. Egypt has its own reason for complying: Hamas is ideologically ­allied with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic opposition to the Egyptian regime. The tunnels under the border separating Egypt from the Gaza Strip bring food and material relief to the people under siege. Yet, under US ­supervision and with the help of US army engineers, Egypt is building an 18-metre-deep underground steel wall to disrupt the tunnels and tighten the blockade.

The wall of shame, as Egyptians call it, will complete the transformation of Gaza into an open-air prison. It is the cruellest example of the concerted ­Israeli-Egyptian-US policy to isolate and prevent Hamas from leading the Palestinian struggle for self-determi­nation. Hamas is habitually dismissed by its enemies as a purely terrorist ­organisation. Yet no one can deny that it won a fair and free election in the West Bank as well as Gaza in January 2006. Moreover, once Hamas gained power through the ballot box, its ­leaders adopted a more pragmatic stand ­towards Israel than that enshrined in its charter, repeatedly expressing its readiness to negotiate a long-term ceasefire. But there was no one to talk to on the Israeli side.

Israel adamantly refused to recognise the Hamas-led government. The US and the European Union ­followed, ­resorting to economic ­sanctions in a vain attempt to turn the people against their elected leaders. This cannot ­possibly bring ­security or stability ­because it is based on the denial of the most ­elementary human rights of the people of Gaza and the collective political rights of the ­Palestinian people. Through its special relationship with the US and its staunch support for ­Israel, the ­British government is implicated in this shameful policy.

At present the British public is ­preoccupied with Tony Blair and the war in Iraq. What is often ­overlooked is that this was only one aspect of a disastrous British policy towards the Middle East, inaugurated by Blair, and which shows no sign of changing under his successor.

One of Blair’s arguments used to ­justify the Iraq war was that it would help bring justice to the long-suffering Palestinians. In his House of Commons speech on 18 March 2003, he promised that action against Iraq would form part of a broader engagement with the problems of the Middle East. He even declared that resolving the Israeli-­Palestinian dispute was as important to Middle East peace as removing Saddam Hussein from power.

Yet by focusing international ­attention on Iraq, the war further ­marginalised the Palestinian question. To be fair, Blair persuaded the Quartet (a group consisting of the US, the UN, the EU and Russia) to issue the Roadmap in 2003, which called for the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel by the end of 2005. But President George Bush was not genuinely committed and only adopted it under pressure from his ­allies. Ariel Sharon, Israel’s hard-line prime minister at the time, wrecked the plan by continuing to expand Israeli settlements on the West Bank. Could Blair really not have realised that for Bush the special relationship that ­counted was the one with Israel? Every time Bush had to choose between Blair and Sharon, he chose Sharon.

Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in August 2005 was not a contribution to the Roadmap but an attempt to unilaterally redraw the borders of Greater Israel and part of a plan to ­entrench the occupation there. Yet in return for the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, Sharon extracted from the US a written agreement to Israel’s ­retention of the major settlement blocs on the West Bank. Bush’s support amounted to an abrupt reversal of US policy since 1967, which regarded the settlements as illegal and as an obstacle to peace. Blair publicly endorsed the pact, probably to preserve a united ­Anglo-American front at any price. It was the most egregious British ­betrayal of the Palestinians since the Balfour Declaration of 1917.

In July 2006, at the height of the savage Israeli onslaught on Lebanon, Blair opposed a security council ­resolution for an immediate and ­unconditional ceasefire: he wanted to give Israel an opportunity to destroy Hezbollah, the radical Shi’ite religious-political movement. One year later, in June 2007, he resigned from office. That day he was appointed the Quartet’s special envoy to Israel and the Palestinian Authority. His main sponsor was Bush and his blatant partisanship on behalf of Israel was probably considered a qualification. His appointment ­coincided with the collapse of the ­Palestinian national unity government, the reassertion of Fatah rule in the West Bank and the violent seizure of power by Hamas in Gaza.

Blair’s main tasks were to mobilise international assistance for the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority, to promote good governance and the rule of law in the Palestinian territories, and to further Palestinian economic development. His broader mission, was “to promote an end to the conflict in conformity with the Roadmap”.

On taking up his appointment, Blair said that: “The absolute priority is to try to give effect to what is now the consensus across the international community – that the only way of bringing stability and peace to the ­Middle East is a two-state solution.” His appointment was received with great satisfaction by the Israelis and with utter dismay by the Arabs.

In his two and a half years as special envoy, Blair has achieved remarkably little. True, Blair helped persuade the Israelis to reduce the number of West Bank checkpoints from 630 to 590; he helped to create employment oppor­tunities; and he may have contributed to a slight improvement in living ­standards in Palestine. But the Americans remained fixated on security rather than on economic development, and their policy remains skewed in favour of ­Israel. Barack Obama made a promising start as ­president by insisting on a complete settlement freeze on the West Bank, but was compelled to back down, ­dashing many of our high hopes.

One reason for Blair’s disappointing results is that he wears too many hats and cannot, as he promised, be “someone who is on the ground spending 24/7 on the issue”. Another reason is his “West Bank first” attitude – ­continuing the western policy of bolstering Fatah and propping up the ailing Palestinian Authority against Hamas. His lack of commitment to Gaza is all too evident. During the Gaza war, he did not call for a ceasefire. He has one standard for ­Israel and one for its victims. His attitude to Gaza is to wait for change rather than risk ­incurring the displeasure of his American and ­Israeli friends. As ­envoy, Blair has been inside Gaza only twice; once to visit a UN school just ­beyond the border and once to Gaza City. His project for sanitation in northern Gaza was never completed because he could not ­persuade the Israelis to ­allow in the last small load of pipes needed. A growing group of western politicians has ­publicly acknowledged the necessity of talking to Hamas if meaningful progress is to be achieved; Blair is not one of their number.

Blair has totally failed to fulfil the ­official role of the envoy “to promote an end to the conflict in conformity with the Roadmap”, largely for reasons beyond his control. The most ­important of these is Israel’s determination to perpetuate the isolation and the de-development of Gaza and deny the Palestinian people a small piece of land – 22% of Mandate-era ­Palestine, to be precise – on which to live in freedom and dignity. It is a policy that Baruch Kimmerling, the late Israeli sociologist, named ­”politicide” – the denial to the ­Palestinian people of any independent political existence in Palestine.

Partly, however, Blair’s failure is due to his own personal limitations; his ­inability to grasp that the fundamental issue in this tragic conflict is not Israeli security but Palestinian national rights, and that concerted and sustained ­international pressure is required to compel Israel to recognise these rights. The core issue cannot be avoided: there can be no settlement of the ­conflict without an end to the Israeli occupation. There is international consensus for a two-state solution, but Israel rejects it and Blair has been unable or unwilling to use the Quartet to enforce it.

Blair’s failure to stand up for Palestinian independence is precisely what endears him to the Israeli establishment. In February of last year, while the ­Palestinians in Gaza were still mourning their dead, Blair received the Dan David prize from Tel Aviv University as the “laureate for the present time ­dimension in the field of leadership”. The citation praised him for his ­”exceptional intelligence and foresight, and demonstrated moral courage and leadership”. The prize is worth $1m. I may be cynical, but I cannot help viewing this prize as absurd, given Blair’s silent complicity in Israel’s ­continuing crimes against the ­Palestinian people.

 Avi Shlaim is professor of international relations at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and the author of Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations (Verso, 2009). His fee for this article has been donated to Medical Aid for Palestine